Notion's New Q&A AI Feature

An "AI Assistant" within search

I’ve been a fan of and a heavy user of the Notion app for quite some time now. I love the UI on web, desktop, and Android. Inline databases are great to work with and I have a Zettelkasten template that serves me perfectly. I also like Notion’s AI features - my favorite before yesterday was getting 5 bullet point summaries of web articles I pull into a database on generative AI news and tools.

That was before yesterday, when I got a Notion email titled: “Introducing Q&A: Get AI-powered answers to your questions in Notion”. That sparked my curiosity right away as it promises to:

• Give you the superhuman ability to remember everything that’s documented across your Notion workspace

• Search across thousands of pages in seconds and show you exactly where it found the answer (a list of all notes relevant to the question)

• Work side-by-side next to your content

• No AI models are trained on your data

It has quickly become my new favorite Notion feature. I’m a big note taker, a taker of copious notes at work, when studying, and just in general. I’m a believer in the idea that our knowledge is our biggest asset (or certainly one of our biggest), in the value of personal knowledge management (PKM), and in the idea that the “humble” notes app is the perfect tool for PKM. And that’s why I’m so excited about this new Notion Q&A feature. For better or worse, it’s exciting to me to see how quick and easy it is to use natural language to find all my notes on a topic.

Notion Q&A AI

I recognize that for many searches in Notion the standard search may be just as fast - but I’m also confident that when I’m struggling to think of the right word or term to search on, Q&A and natural language will get me exactly what I need. Here’s one more example of using it:

If any of you are Notion users and using the Notion AI add-on I’m interested to hear your thoughts on Q&A if you have tried it out.